Recommendation 14

University College London found that older people, men, and people in lower- income households were consistently less likely to request a test following symptoms.25 We asked our witnesses how the test and trace system could be improved to reach those who were not currently being reached. The previous Head of NHST&T recognised that one of the most important lessons over the last year had been the importance of targeting and tailoring services to work for those who needed them most. The Chief Executive of the UKHSA agreed that the test and trace service needed to know who it had to reach, and told us it now had really good data to enable this. They explained that data available through Test and Trace was routinely reviewed and that age group, ethnicity, working group and locality were all considered as part of this. They also told us that it matched testing data and immunisation data, as often the communities or groups which were not coming forward for vaccination were also not coming forward for testing.26 We asked whether they were now confident they had the data and baselines needed to identify and target under-represented groups. The Chief Executive of the UKHSA explained that it was “monitoring a lot of these areas far more than we could ever have done to start with, and we will continue to do so”.27 They committed to providing us with baseline data about the under-represented groups that NHST&T intended to focus on, so that they could later inform us exactly what changes had taken place within these groups.28 However, NHST&T was subsequently unable to provide this information. In their letter to us after our evidence session, the Department and the Chief Executive of the UKHSA told us when NHST&T compared test and trace data to the national picture, it could see that some groups of people were underrepresented in the testing programme and that it was focusing on how best to provide services to those in these “disproportionately impacted and underserved groups”.